Fakemink's Video Game Sample

Before changing his name to Fakemink, Mink released music as 9090gate. The 9090gate artist profile is still up on streaming services as well as his entire catalogue of music. In a way, the music under 9090gate allows listeners to hear a sonic evolution into the Fakemink sound we know and love today.

Amongst this goldmine of old singles is a song titled "Me and Rosh," from February, 2024. What many do not know, is that the beat of this song not only samples Lil B's "Girl When I Want You," but also the most famous video game Easter Egg of all time.

In 1992, the arcade game Mortal Kombat was released by Midway. The game was meant to compete with Capcom's Street Fighter II. The original development team only consisted of four people and was given a $1M budget. One of these four developers was Dan Forden, a sound designer and composer.

This group of co-workers would frequently play video games together, namely, a football game called Super High Impact. While playing this game together, Dan would say, "I predict Cast, which was his way of saying "You're toast." Eventually, this quote would evolve into Dan singing in a falsetto voice, "I predict toasty!"

After the success of the first game, the team would take even more creative liberties when creating Mortal Kombat II. One of the guys in the studio suggested to Dan that he should put in some of the "weird stuff" he says into the game.

When the second game released, fans quickly discovered that upon performing "a particularly vicious uppercut," (that's how the MK wiki describes it) a small picture of Dan would appear in the bottom right corner and a sound of him singing,"Toasty!" would play. Toasty also occurred when a player using Scorpion performed his signature fatality.

Since then, the Toasty joke has been featured in every iteration and sequel in the Mortal Kombat series; the games even tend to use a new picture of Dan in each new installment. Toasty became something of a staple in popular culture and even occurs in a puzzle game called Peggle (pretty fun game). The sound has also been sampled several times by SpaceGhostPurrp in songs such as "Been Fweago" and "Pheel Tha Phonk 1990."

I love when producers sample video games and memes from the early internet in a way that feels natural; Me and Rosh is a good song if you haven't heard it. I remember as a little kid, my friend Matthew was a big Mortal Kombat fan and would occasionally yell out "Toasty!" but I didn't realize what it was from until quite some time later. I don't play the games much, but when I do, I play as Noob Saibot. Noob's name is actually the last names of MK co-creators, Ed Boon and John Tobias spelt backwards.

Do you play Mortal Kombat? Who is your main?